Collection of Hesiod, Homer and Homerica

school is forced to season its matter with romantic
episodes, and that later it tends more and more to revert (as in
the "Shield of Heracles") to the Homeric tradition.

The Boeotian School

How did the continental school of epic poetry arise? There is
little definite material for an answer to this question, but the
probability is that there were at least three contributory
causes. First, it is likely that before the rise of the Ionian
epos there existed in Boeotia a purely popular and indigenous
poetry of a crude form: it comprised, we may suppose, versified
proverbs and precepts relating to life in general, agricultural
maxims, weather-lore, and the like. In this sense the Boeotian
poetry may be taken to have its germ in maxims similar to our
English
`Till May be out, ne'er cast a clout,'

or

`A rainbow in the morning
Is the Shepherd's warning.'

Secondly and thirdly we may ascribe the rise of the new epic to
the nature of the Boeotian people and, as already remarked, to a